Transactional Careers
A longitudinal panel of online knowledge workers followed since 2019 — more than 450 interviews — tracing how careers, identities, and livelihoods take shape when work is bought and sold through digital platforms.
Associate Professor
Department of Management and Business
Skidmore College
Michael Dunn
I study how technology is changing the nature and future of work — what happens to workers, careers, and organizations as employment moves from long-term jobs toward contingent, project-based arrangements mediated by digital systems.
I am a management scholar with a sociologist's training and a product manager's past. My research sits at the intersection of technology, organizations, and work. Its anchor is a seven-year longitudinal study of digitally mediated careers, supported by two National Science Foundation awards: one following online knowledge workers as the platforms they depend on reshape how labor is bought and sold, and one designing digital tools, with those workers, that complement rather than replace them. Further projects study the organizations entrepreneurs build inside digital infrastructure and — newest — how online workers are learning to use, and compete with, AI-enabled systems. Before academia I spent a decade in technology product management and workforce training, and the questions that drove that work still drive this one: who benefits when technology changes how work gets done, and who bears the cost?
Current Projects
Newest project
Digital Workers at the AI Edge
Online freelancers are among the first workers to both use and compete with AI. A new panel study of how they adopt AI-enabled systems, where those systems help them or threaten their work, and how workers and systems change together over time.
AI-Enabled Tools
An NSF-funded human-centered design project building tools, with online workers, that help them market themselves, find good work, and get credit for it — technology designed to complement people rather than replace them.
Digital Entrepreneurship
Interviews with founders who built agencies inside Upwork, examining how digital infrastructure shapes entrepreneurial orientation, founder skills, and organizational form.